The Fabelmans: Less a Spielberg Auto-Biopic Than a Warm Love Letter to His Mismatched Parents
By Karen Gordon
Rating: B-plus
Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans, which won the coveted People’s Choice award at the most recent Toronto International Film Festival, is a warm and easygoing family drama and coming-of-age story based on the director’s life.
But you’re out of luck if you’re looking for deep insights into how a boy seized by movies, grew up to be one of the most successful directors in Hollywood.
Although The Fablelmans tells the story of the kid with the camera and home editing equipment, it doesn’t dive very deeply into what fueled his interest, or what his influences were. Instead, it feels more like Spielberg’s homage to his parents, Arnold and Leah, to whom the film is dedicated.
Canadian kid Gabriel LaBelle steals The Fabelmans as its young Spielberg-esque lead
The Fabelmans opens in 1952, when a somewhat anxious six year old Sammy Fabelman (Mateo Zoryon Francis-DeFord ) whose parents, Burt (Paul Dano) and Mitzi (Michelle Williams) are taking him to a movie theatre for the first time.
Sammy is incredibly anxious, anticipating being overwhelmed based on what he’s heard about the experience. The movie, appropriately enough The Greatest Show on Earth, both fascinates and freaks out little Sammy. In particular, a scene featuring a dramatic train crash that fills the screen with drama and carnage, sticks with him.
Soon after, Sammy gets an electric train set for Chanukah, (one car for each night!), he figures out that he can recreate the movie scene using a few of his toys, and damages the little trains in the process.
He explains to his parents that it’s his way of working out what scared him. That inspires Mitzi to give her son the family’s home movie camera. The deal is that he can do one more crash and film it, so he can relive it when he wants to.
She’s unleashed the beast! Little Sammy is fascinated with what he can do with his camera. And from that time onward, he’s the house auteur, filming family events, and making little movies starring his sisters, using household products for costumes and special effects.
At this point the family lives in New Jersey, Sammy is the oldest of three kids, soon to be four, and the only boy. They live in a suburb where theirs is the only house not lit up with Christmas decorations, which Sammy notes forlornly. It underlines that already Sammy, like many Jewish American kids of that generation, has a sense of feeling like an outsider.
Still, it’s a warm and busy home, where the grandmothers on both sides (Jeannie Berlin, Robin Bartlett) regularly come for dinner, and some Jewish grandmother-style repartee.
Burt is quiet, and steady: A brilliant computer engineer/designer whose ideas run ahead of the demands of the mainstream companies he works for, GE and ultimately IBM in California.
Mitzi is an artist, and a talented pianist, who set aside what might have been a successful career as a concert pianist when they had children. Mitzi and Burt seem like an example of opposites attract. He’s a bit dull, in a good way, and she’s a big personality, and, for a suburban mom, a bit of a free spirit. They’re both dedicated to their kids. It’s a big happy family.
There’ s another frequent presence in the Fabelman home. Burt’s co-worker and close friend Benny, (Seth Rogen), who the family, to Sammy’s consternation, refers to as Uncle Benny.
Benny’s ties to the family are a bit sticky. When Burt announces he’s accepted a new job in Phoenix, Arizona, Mitzi has a fit when she hears that he isn’t taking Benny. And so, Burt gets Benny a job, and the family plus ‘Uncle Benny’ move to Arizona.
In Phoenix, Sammy’s movie making gets more sophisticated. Now a teenager, played by Canadian actor Gabriel LaBelle, and a boy scout, he makes a movie to earn a photography badge and ignites an interest in his fellow scouts, turning them into actors and crew, and makes movies that are riffs on the westerns and war movies he loves.
Sammy’s camera brings him a focus and a lot of joy, until he films a family camping trip and notices on the edges of the frame that he’s caught a glimpse of what’s going on between his mom and Benny. It changes the dynamic between him and Mitzi, and also his feelings about making movies.
There is one more move for The Fabelmans. Burt gets a job in California, and the family moves, this time without Benny.
For Sammy, now in his senior year of high school, the move is jarring. He’s put his camera away, he thinks forever. For the first time he has to deal with some nasty racism when he becomes the target of some violent anti-Semitic school bullies.
And at home, Mitzi is slipping into a depression.
Spielberg co-wrote the script with Oscar-nominated Tony Kushner, who has written three previous movies for Spielberg: West Side Story (2021), Lincoln (2013) and Munich (2005).
That’s a formidable team. And they’ve put together a movie that is very approachable.
Although The Fabelmans is based on Spielberg’s life, this isn’t an attempt to make ‘boy genius grows up to seize his destiny and become a filmmaker extraordinaire.’ Instead, the film looks at the dynamic in the family, and how that affected his way of seeing the world. In other words, it’s a movie that aims to tell a complicated story, with a light touch, a sense of humour and in a loving way.
Burt and Mitzi may be trying to stick it out together, but their relationship isn’t intense. They’re not mean to each other, or at each other’s throats. There aren’t explanations, or ugly moments in the family so there’s no major crescendo. We get enough to understand that there’s a fault line in the family, but the deep conversations about it happen offscreen. It keeps the film gracious, but also, to a certain extent, predictable.
The Fabelmans doesn’t attempt a deep dive in any real direction. That approach preserves a certain dignity, for both the Fabelmans and the Spielbergs.
That reserve is understandable when a son makes a film about his parents, who were decent and loving, and it arguably makes the film a bit sweeter. Still, one wishes that it had dug in a bit more when it came to Sammy. We never really know what inspires young Sammy about the movies. Just that he makes them, has a talent, and that he was allowed, and even encouraged especially by Mitzi, to pursue it.
Paul Dano and Michelle Williams are both fine actors. But the sparkle in the film, the actor who brings life to the proceedings is Gabriel LaBelle who plays teenage Sammy. This will no doubt be a breakout role for him. Also fun is a cameo from Judd Hirsch as Sammy’s eccentric great Uncle Boris.
The Fabelmans, written by Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner, Directed by Tony Kushner, starring Gabriel LaBelle, Michelle Williams, Paul Dano, Seth Rogen.Opens in theatres, Wednesday, November 23.